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Epicurious recently listed the mojito as one of its favorite summertime beverages. Consider the ingredients of this Cuban cocktail through a powers-of-ten lens. Fresh lime juice In early 19th century Britain, sailors were required to consume a daily ration of lime juice to prevent scurvy, which is why British Navy men were known as “limeys.” [...]

On August 5, 2012, the Curiosity rover landed on the Red Planet in what The New York Times calls “a flawless, triumphant technological tour de force.” It took the rover over eight months to make the 352-million-mile trip (10+08). In a recent video, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) details the final minutes of the rover’s [...]

Bacteria microbes that are 10-06 meters long and freezing away on the bottom of the Arctic Ocean floor may actually thrive best in hot temperatures that would put the health of most human beings at extreme risk. According to a new study, while these tiny bugs lie dormant now, they will likely wait for up [...]

“Visible light” corresponds to a wavelength of 400 – 700 nanometers or 10-07 meters. The visible colors from shortest to longest wavelength are: violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. You’ll notice that the color pink doesn’t appear anywhere on that list. Recently, there has been debate as to whether or not the color pink [...]

The largest earthquake ever recorded took place in Valdivia, Chile on the evening of May 22, 1960. The U.S. Geological Survey explains that it reached a magnitude of 9.5 on the Richter scale (the energy equivalent of 10+18 joules) and spanned roughly 1,000 kilometers of land (10+04) from Lebu to Puerto Aisen. The earthquake left [...]

Here are a few facts you might not know about your skin. . . Skin is your body’s largest organ. Globally, dead skin accounts for about a billion tons (10+09) or 1 trillion pounds (10+12) of dust in the atmosphere. Your skin sheds 50,000 cells every minute— that’s 72,000,000 cells (10+07) each day and 26,280,000,000 [...]

The average child has over 60,000 miles (10+04) of blood vessels in his or her body, according to The Franklin Institute. Adults have even more—roughly 100,000 miles (10+05) of blood vessels. Laid out end to end, they would circle the earth four times and the moon nearly fifteen.

Honey bees collect nectar and store it as honey to give them energy and keep their hives warm. In the hottest months, a healthy hive has anywhere from 40,000 to 80,000 bees (10+04). Most bee colonies have one breeding female, the ‘queen’, a few thousand males, known as ‘drones’, and thousands and thousands of sterile [...]

There are many ways to look at 10-15. This power of ten is: the scale of the atomic nucleus the length in meters of a proton and neutron the weight in kilograms of an E. coli bacterium the pressure in pascals of outer space between stars in the Milky Way the size or volume in [...]